For a president whose second-term agenda has stalled out, Barack Obama appeared remarkably relaxed — perhaps even subdued — in Friday’s pre-vacation press conference, where he managed to stick to the national security turf that traditionally plays well for a commander in chief.

And that was Obama’s plan.

Hours before he stepped to the podium in the East Room, Obama’s aides briefed reporters on a new four-part review of surveillance policy aimed at convincing the American public of what Obama already believes: That the government isn’t abusing its spy powers. That revelation essentially guaranteed the top news would be about the NSA and pushed domestic issues to the back of line.

But the seriousness of the substance didn’t stop Obama from engaging in a bit of summer silliness with hallmark metaphors and analogies — trust but verify on surveillance, he said, like Michelle Obama trusted but verified when he said he’d done the dishes. Here are POLITICO’s five takeaways on the president’s getaway press conference.

1) Obama won by staking out national security turf

There’s no clear path for funding the government past Sept. 30, raising the fast-approaching debt-ceiling, or getting a comprehensive immigration overhaul through Congress. Even Obama concedes that Obamacare will hit some bumps come October.

But while he’s taken some criticism over the government’s surveillance program, the mildness of his recent rebuke of Russia, and the decision to close 19 U.S. embassies and consulates this week in response to a terrorism threat, most of those complaints have come from the far right and the far left, leaving Obama plenty of politically safe territory on national security matters.

So, he rolled out the surveillance “reform” package, providing a platform for a spate of questions about the nation’s spy programs, NSA leaker Edward Snowden, his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the degree to which al Qaeda remains a threat to the United States in the months after he declared the group “decimated” and “on the run.”

Never mind that much of his new proposal would require action by a gridlocked Congress — the same Congress Obama blamed for inaction on his domestic agenda. Obama made it pretty plain in his own words that the proposal was aimed, like the press conference, at public relations more than policy-making.

“The programs are operating in a way that prevents abuse. That continues to be true without the reforms,” he said. “The question is how do we make the American people more comfortable? If I tell Michelle that I did the dishes — now, granted, in the White House, I don’t do the dishes that much, but back in the day — (laughter) — and — and she’s a little skeptical, well, I’d like her to trust me, but maybe I need to bring her back and show her the dishes and not just have her take my word for it.”

2) Obama praised Larry Summers, but did he bury him, too?

In the span of a couple of minutes, Obama offered a sincere defense of Larry Summers, the oft-maligned candidate long assumed to be his pick to succeed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke — and then made the kind of comparison that should send a shiver down Summers’s spine.

“I know the quality of those people and I see them getting slapped around in the press for no reason before they’ve even been nominated for anything, then I want to make sure that somebody’s standing up for them,” said Obama, who hates it when he thinks he’s being boxed into a decision. “I felt the same way when people were attacking Susan Rice before she was nominated for anything.”

Rice lost out on the job she wanted, secretary of State, before being named national security adviser.

Another possible clue to Obama’s thinking, he mentioned that Summers and Janet Yellen aren’t the only qualified candidates for the job.

”There are a couple other candidates who are highly qualified as well. I’ll make the decision in — in the fall,” he said.”

3) Hitting GOP but lowering expectations on health care

Obama let loose on the set of congressional Republicans who want to shut down the government so that they can deny funding for the implementation of his health care law. Go ahead, Obama said, play a losing hand.

“I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail,” he said. “The idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million people from getting health care is a bad idea.”

But, in much more subtle fashion, he began to lower the bar for full implementation of the law, conceding that it won’t be smooth.

“There are going to be some glitches; no doubt about it,” he said. “There are going to be things where we say, you know what? We should have thought of that earlier, or this would work a little bit better or this needs an adjustment. … That’s true, by the way, of a car company rolling out a new car. It’s true of Apple rolling out the new iPad.”

4) He knows he’s losing some of the civil libertarians on the left

As he rolled out the review of surveillance programs, Obama delivered a full-throated paean to the patriotism of civil libertarians, a clear nod to the damage recent leaks have done to his standing with a portion of his base in Congress and among the general public.

“The men and women of our intelligence community work every single day to keep us safe because they love this country and believe in our values. They’re patriots,” he said. “And I believe that those who have lawfully raised their voices on behalf of privacy and civil liberties are also patriots who love our country and want it to live up to our highest ideals.”

5) Obama doesn’t like Vladimir Putin, not one bit

Injecting new video-game jargon into U.S.-Russia relations, Obama told reporters that he wanted to push “pause” on his famous “Russia reset.”

“I’ve encouraged Mr. Putin to think forward as opposed to backwards on those issues — with mixed success,” he said. “And, you know, I think the latest episode is just one more in a number of emerging differences that we’ve seen over the last several months around Syria, around human rights issues where, you know, it is probably appropriate for us to take a pause” to reassess the relationship.

He even stressed that they get along fine. “I don’t have a bad personal relationship with Putin,” Obama said. But then he made their tiff more personal, comparing Putin to a poor pupil.

“I know the press likes to focus on body language, and he’s got that kind of slouch,” the president said, “looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.”